Best Email Marketing Software and Services of 2024

Marketing is all about reaching your target audience in a way that encourages them to engage with your brand. Unfortunately, in today’s world, consumers are flooded with marketing messages at all times. One of the most effective, unintrusive ways to reach your most engaged audience remains email marketing, and using top-tier email marketing software can help you device campaigns to lead to more conversions.

“Email marketing is versatile and effective at every stage of the sales funnel,” said Chris Ferris, senior vice president of digital strategy at Pierpont Communications. “It helps grow and maintain brand awareness, generate interest, foster consideration, drive conversions, retain customers and encourage advocacy.”

The best email marketing software gives you numerous ways to monitor the performance of your campaigns. This example comes from Mailchimp and compares the open rates and click rates of multiple recent email sends. Source: Mailchimp

If none of our best picks seem like the right fit for your business, consider the following platforms. While these weren’t among our best picks, they’re reliable, effective tools that many businesses may find suitable instead.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign’s marketing solutions are perfect for online sellers, thanks to a wide array of tools to streamline sales and marketing efforts. Recently, ActiveCampaign made platform speed enhancements to decrease the time spent building or designing emails and campaigns. The company also recreated its email designer function with more features that can be added to emails to make them stand out. We like that ActiveCampaign integrates with more than 850 customer engagement solutions, including Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce. This means your sales data from those platforms automatically feeds into your ActiveCampaign e-commerce dashboard, which allows you to create effective and personalized email campaigns based on your customer data. With over 125 templates to choose from and unlimited email sends to up to 250,000 contacts, it’s easy to develop targeted marketing communications for every customer on your list.

“Tools like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign are great because they offer automation workflows and A/B testing, which helps you customize your content and see what your audience likes best,” said Mark Hayes, head of growth at TASK Group. “This data-driven approach can really boost your campaign’s effectiveness and overall ROI, best of all they have industry leading deliverability and are intuitive to use.”

iContact

iContact is a great email marketing solution for businesses that want to start free and scale up in the future. With 500 contacts and up to 2,000 sends per month, the free version of iContact offers everything you need to get started with email campaigns as you build up your subscriber base. We like iContact’s drag-and-drop email designer and its professionally designed template library. Both iContact pricing plans grant access to the company’s template and stock image library; landing page creation and hosting option; A/B testing capabilities; real-time campaign reports; API integrations; and automation features. However, automations are limited in the free iContact plan; if you want features such as Smart Sending (which optimizes send times based on your contacts’ time zones), audience segmentation, engagement follow-ups and multiple event series campaigns, you’ll have to upgrade to the Advanced plan, which starts at $23 per month for 1,500 contacts.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an excellent tool for midsize and large companies that want to improve their email campaigns and marketing strategies. Email Studio is just one of the many marketing tools in Marketing Cloud, which helps businesses leverage powerful data and email personalization to maintain relationships between their customers and sales teams. Salesforce is a feature-rich platform with some of the best CRM software functionality to allow deep customization of your emails. Email Studio alone has a variety of features with practically limitless options to digitize and customize your workflow. You can easily target your campaigns to as small or as large of an audience you need. Salesforce’s data-driven email customization features offer plenty of unique and engaging options for your campaigns.

Most email marketing software providers offer a range of plans with monthly fees based on the number of email contacts you have or the number of emails you send. Free options typically provide limited features and cap you at a certain number of contacts and/or monthly email sends, while some paid plans allow you to send an unlimited number of emails each month.

If you know or can estimate the number of emails your company will send each month or how many subscribers you expect to have, these numbers will dictate which pricing tier you should choose. Depending on your estimates and the features you want in your software, you can expect to pay anywhere from $9 to $400 per month for premium email marketing plans. For businesses that need an email marketing service only occasionally, some providers offer per-email or pay-as-you-go pricing. This is a flexible option that lets you pay only for what you use, rather than for a monthly subscription with features that may go to waste.

Most email marketing services offer a free version of their software or a free trial so you can test the software and see how it works for you. The free trials we found range from 14 to 60 days. We recommend trying as many free trials as you can during your search.

An email marketing platform may offer a range of features, but there are some core tools you should always look for.

“Look for features that allow segmentation, personalization, and automation,” said Martin Purmensky, founder of theVideoCards. “The software should also provide compliance tools to adhere to regulations.”

Here’s a closer look at some of the key features we looked for in the email marketing software we reviewed.

Email Creation Tool

Most services provide a library of customizable templates or an intuitive drag-and-drop tool that allows you to customize your emails. Some providers have templates that show you how your email will look on multiple devices (such as laptops, tablets and mobile phones) to help you design a flexible and responsive email.

The best email creation tools are easy to use but flexible enough to help you design eye-catching, unique content. Mailchimp’s email creation tool, pictured above, also offers a creative assistant that can automatically generate recommendations of how to build your content. Source: Mailchimp

Analytics

Many email marketing services offer analytics on your email open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, audience geolocation, conversion tracking, customer behavior trends and more. Some integrate with Google Analytics, while some provide their own analytics that present the information in easy-to-read charts and graphs.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is the ability to send specific, targeted emails to customers when they complete a certain action. For example, if a visitor to your website signs up to receive emails from you, your marketing automation tool triggers a welcome email to go to that customer’s inbox.

Segmentation

Segmentation is another helpful way to deliver more relevant messages to your prospects and customers by grouping them according to age, location, gender, industry, interests or other factors. Segmentation allows you to send different emails to different groups, rather than sending one mass email that may not be relevant to your entire customer base.

Contact Management

A contact management tool helps you acquire, sort and manage email contacts. It also provides features such as automatic deletion of dead or duplicate contacts; importing; exporting; grouping; and integration with other management tools, like a CRM or CMS.

Social Media Integration

Most email marketing services integrate with social media platforms, allowing you to grow your contact list, schedule posts, and track your followers’ engagement to determine what’s popular. Integrating your social media with email marketing helps you make the most of multichannel marketing by providing more information about your customers as well as more opportunities for them to see messages from you.

Hubspot Marketing Hub includes all the tools marketers need for effective email marketing campaigns and ongoing social media management. It is one of the best platforms when it comes to an all-in-one tool that provides seamless integrations between marketing software. Source: HubSpot

If you’re looking for an email marketing solution, follow this step-by-step guide to help you choose the right one.

1. Define your budget, parameters and goals for your email campaigns.

As with any marketing strategy, you’ll want to define the scope of your efforts before searching for a software solution. Figure out how much of your marketing budget you want to allocate to email marketing, and establish your plans for campaign frequency and the overall goals of your campaigns (brand awareness, sales, customer loyalty, etc.).

2. Read reviews to narrow down your options.

Read reviews from customers and best picks lists like this one to learn about the pricing, features, limits, pros and cons, and customer support of each service you’re considering. This will help you eliminate providers that are outside your budget or that don’t offer the right mix of features and value for your needs.

3. Sign up for free trials.

Many popular email marketing solutions offer free trials or fully free versions of their software. Create an account to try out each of your top contenders, and play around with the templates, email builders and other features. Consider ease of use, API and integration options, automation features, and the contact or send limits of your preferred plan. You may also wish to contact customer service to ask any additional questions and to test the level of support you might receive as a customer.

“Look for software that offers attractive templates, customer segmentation based on purchase behavior, and automation for personalized messages like birthday greetings or promotions,” said Baruch Labunski, founder of Rank Secure. “The ability to customize emails with recipient names and unique preferences is crucial.”

4. Decide on your email marketing software, and begin running campaigns.

Once you’ve tried out your top software choices, commit to one and begin building your email list to start running campaigns.

There are many benefits of email marketing software for businesses that want to develop strong, direct relationships with their customers.

Personalized, Automated Customer Engagements

The best email marketing software allows you to use customer data to create and deliver personalized campaigns that will resonate with each recipient. With automation tools, you can set up workflows to automatically send tailored emails to certain customers based on metrics such as purchasing behaviors and special dates, like birthdays, anniversaries, and approaching contract milestones.

The best email marketing software provides insights that support your email campaigns and help drive better results. In the example above, Constant Contact’s optimization tool identifies the best times to send your email to boost user engagement as much as possible. Source: Constant Contact

Reports and Insights

Email marketing software offers a treasure trove of data to help you improve your marketing campaigns. You can see which subscribers opened, ignored or deleted your emails, as well as which campaigns were opened multiple times and led to website click-throughs. With A/B testing features, you can send two versions of a campaign to see which one elicited the most engagement.

Scalability

Most email marketing solutions offer multiple pricing tiers that allow you to scale up your contact lists and email sends as your business and subscriber base grow. You can reach and manage hundreds of thousands of contacts from one easy-to-use platform.

Integrations With Other Marketing Solutions

Email marketing platforms that are part of larger marketing software products, such as CRM solutions, allow you to manage your contacts and communications throughout the customer journey. When your email marketing software integrates with your other systems, your whole team will have access to important customer data and insights.

At Business News Daily, our team of small business marketing experts have been researching and testing email marketing software for years, comparing some of the leading solutions across more than 30 key metrics. We considered 25 email marketing software platforms and closely reviewed and tested 14 of them before selecting our six best picks above.

Below are the factors we considered when determining our best picks. Each is weighted according to how much the criteria typically influences business owners’ buying decisions.

• Pricing (30%): We considered not just the base cost of the software but also the number of pricing plans available, additional fees, and add-on costs to determine which provide the best overall value.
• Features (25%): We evaluated each email marketing platform’s dashboard, as well as key features like contact lists, content creation tools, audience segmentation, workflow management tools and artificial intelligence support such as generative AI features. We also considered available integrations to other popular business software.
• Usability (20%): We paid close attention to the ease with which each platform could be set up, how intuitive we found the navigation and use of key features, and the training and informational resources available to new users. We also considered whether the software offered a responsive mobile app or mobile browser.
• Customer Support (15%): We examined the ease with which customers can contact a customer support team when in need of help. We reviewed customer feedback to determine how well the customer service team meets the needs of existing customers.
• Expert Insight (10%): Our product reviews are conducted by software and industry experts who are deeply familiar with email marketing solutions. Given their institutional knowledge of different platforms and firsthand experiences using these programs, we take their judgment into account when determining our best picks.

In addition to scoring each email marketing software we reviewed based on this criteria, we also determined the best use case scenarios for each. No two businesses are exactly alike, so we put ourselves in the shoes of different types of small business owners and identify the best email marketing software for a variety of needs.

To learn more about how we review and test marketing products and services for small businesses, read about our editorial process here.

In 2024, much of the world’s population is still stationed at home and the sending of emails shows no sign of slowing down. Data from The Radicati Group estimates over 376 billion emails will be sent by the end of 2025. Knowing how valuable this medium continues to be, the Digital Journal predicts a massive CAGR growth of 11.6 percent by 2029 for the global email marketing software market.

The increased need for digital advertising at a cheaper rate is impacting the future of the market. Additionally, many major brands are focusing their messaging to include their company mission or adapt to industry trends. They are aiming to include a more personal style of messaging to better connect with their consumer base.

We expect email marketing software providers to continue to focus on adding more automation and personalization tools. Both will help streamline the email marketing process while also increasing the critical engagement businesses are looking for when using email marketing as a key component of their overall marketing strategy.

We also expect artificial intelligence (AI) to play an increasingly important role in streamlining the email marketing process. In fact, 57 percent of marketers in large organizations have incorporated artificial intelligence into their email marketing strategies, as reported by MarketingDive.

With the explosive growth of generative AI, more businesses will likely adopt it in 2024 to brainstorm campaign concepts, draft marketing copy and even create visuals to incorporate into emails. Companies can also use AI to develop alternate campaign materials and copy to facilitate A/B testing, as well as leverage its analytics to further personalize and tailor messages to customers. However, Email marketers should remember that AI is not designed to replace the human element or other marketing tools and strategies. Using AI as one tool in the toolbox, rather than the only tool, will likely drive the best results.

Another industry change that will affect some marketers is the new sending requirements for campaigns going to Gmail and Yahoo/AOL Mail! addresses. As of February 2024, qualifying users who send over 5,000 messages per day or 150,000 monthly on these platforms will need to adhere to these new guidelines aimed at bolstering security. The requirements are set to protect recipients from potential email frauds like phishing, while also ensuring that messages reach actual, interested users.

As part of these changes, senders who meet the criteria will need to verify their email identities using DomainKeys Identified Mail. In addition, the unsubscribing process for recipients must be simplified, with a mandated one-click option in emails and adherence to unsubscription requests within 48 hours. Moreover, there will be a new standard for maintaining a spam rate below 0.30 percent to confirm that emails are sent only to willing recipients, although the platforms recommend a more stringent target of 0.10 percent.